All Books

  • Oreo
    $14.95

    A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City

    Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.

  • Three Parties
    Sold out

    A queer Palestinian refugee plans to come out at his elaborate birthday dinner party in this tragicomic modern reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

    Firas Dareer wakes up on his twenty-third birthday with a sense of purpose: today he’ll jump from a Stage 3 to a Stage 6 in his self-determined Coming Out Scale, professing his sexuality to a captive audience of immediate and extended family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and neighbours. But despite the meticulously designed invitations, carefully chosen place settings and floral centerpieces, painstakingly curated playlist, and agonizingly fretted-over menu, factors begin to spin out of his control.

    Threatening to thwart his big moment are his younger brother, whose mental fragility requires him to be monitored at all times; his cantankerous grandfather, who’s just completed his third escape from the retirement home; the Dareers’ embittered housekeeper (and Firas’s arch nemesis), who could scoop the story before he gets the chance; his harried boss, who on this of all days calls him into work at the architecture firm, where his colleagues share a talent for butchering his name; and his mother, whose accidental text message may have blown the cover of an illicit extra-marital affair. There’s also the fact that Firas too has found himself in a love triangle of sorts, choosing between soft and steady Tyrese and fiery Kashif, who makes a sport out of demonstrating how Palestinian he is.

    As the future Firas has precisely architected for himself slips further out of his grasp, the past comes crashing in like a wrecking ball. Sharp, darkly funny, and full of surprises, Three Parties pays twisted homage to a literary classic, gleefully upends the western coming-out narrative, and sensitively explores the traumas and pressures faced by Palestinian immigrants—all in the span of a single life-changing day.

  • Daddy Issues: Stories (Zero Street Fiction)
    $21.95

    Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction

    Daddy Issues is a collection of moving and complex—yet simply and directly told—stories of queer Asian American experiences in Los Angeles. In many of these stories, the protagonists are artists and writers and other creative thinkers living on the fringe of survival, attempting to align a life of the imagination with the practical considerations of career, income, and family: a gay father who hasn’t come out to his young son; a social worker, numbed by the destitution of his clients, who finds himself lost in self-destruction; a trans man who returns home to a father with dementia to help his family pack as they are pushed out by gentrification; a husband who can only stand aside as his wife heals from a miscarriage; and a broke writer who learns to love his stories again.

    The stories in Daddy Issues offer different contemplations on solitude—the good and the bad of it. Ultimately, this collection by Eric C. Wat is full of hope, and it shows how we can find the connections we need once we allow ourselves to become vulnerable.

  • Expensive Basketball
    $30.00

    From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Rap Year Book and Basketball (and Other Things), a clever and inventive examination of some of basketball's most iconic players, moments, games, and more.

    Everything in basketball is measured. Everything in basketball is counted, and quantified, and computed. And yet, no matter how expansive the list of various pinpoint-specific statistical categories gets, some basketball things remain uncountable, and unquantifiable.

    Some moments are more poetry than calculation; more art than numerical value; more feeling than data processing. And thus: Expensive Basketball.

    From the final 196 seconds of Kobe Bryant’s playing career to the Sue Bird backpedal, from the erosive terror of Tim Duncan to the Larry Bird memory carousel, Expensive Basketball is an affirmation of feelings.

    It’s an affirmation of basketball as virtuosity. 

    It’s an affirmation of how sometimes you watch a person perform on the basketball court and it feels the same way it does when you lie in the grass at night and stare up at the moon for long enough that you start to think about how incredible it is that you really, truly, honestly, actually exist.

  • PRE-ORDER: Martha's Daughter: (Of the Diaspora)
    $26.00

    Martha’s Daughter is the brilliant and influential author David Haynes’s first short story collection and the first time that Haynes’s stories have ever been assembled in one volume. Steeped in everyday gossip and lives, this collection ranges from the magically real life of a city’s crumbling superhero to a rundown motel whose long-term guests are lucky to call home. In the titular novella the first hours are chronicled after Cynthia finds out her mother has died. What we learn is that Cynthia is a woman who has been bullied by her mother’s overbearing opinions, her disdain for difference, her respectability politics, and her outdated beliefs about how men and women should relate to one another. Martha’s death is less a catalyst for Cynthia’s grief than an opportunity to free herself of a burden too long endured.

    The sixth in McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, Martha’s Daughter is another record in David’s oeuvre, of the people and places he’s been recording since the beginning of his career, some thirty years ago. With its full-circle connection to Haynes’s previous novels, Martha’s Daughter is guaranteed to enthrall longtime fans and new readers alike.

  • The Grand Paloma Resort: A Novel
    from $20.00

    The Grand Paloma Resort is a lush paradise in the Dominican Republic where guests enjoy incredible luxury, and the staff is always eager to please—that is, until they are pushed to the brink.

    Laura is a manager at the Grand Paloma Resort, a Dominican woman who has risen this far through sheer hard work. Her idea to pair “platinum” guests with a resort employee to attend to their every need has been wildly successful. She’s mere weeks away from a promotion that will blaze a path off the resort, to a life of opportunity. If only her younger sister, Elena—who she’s looked after since the death of their mother – could get with the program.

    Elena has tried her best to live up to her sister’s expectations. To escape the drudgery of waiting on rich tourists, she’s become increasingly dependent on pills and partying. As a babysitter at the resort, she’s at the mercy of guests who travel to indulge their worst impulses and need someone else to watch their kids while they do so. Now, after an accident, a child in her charge is believed dead, and Elena knows she'll be held responsible.

    At a local beachfront watering hole, Elena runs into the child’s father. He offers her an obscene amount of money to give him private time with two young local girls. Elena pockets the cash to fund her escape and prays she’s gotten the girls out of harm’s way.

    Set over the course of seven days, The Grand Paloma Resort offers an unforgettable story of class, family, and community, building to an intense climax in which the true costs of luxury are laid bare, forcing Laura and Elena to reckon with long-held secrets and true acts of love.

  • Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture at the University of Texas at Austin

    Lise Ragbir

    $50.00

    What began as an effort to prevent the neglect and potential loss of hundreds of African objects at the University of Texas at Austin has evolved into one of the most significant collections on campus. The art collections at Black Studies were born from the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative, under the leadership of Cherise Smith, Omi L. Jones, and Edmund T. Gordon.

    Today Black Studies at the University of Texas boasts approximately 900 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 contemporary works from African American and Afro-Caribbean artists, and more than 100 pieces jointly held with other collecting entities on campus, adding a diverse richness to the overall collections. Collecting Black Studies gathers and presents these holdings—including costumes, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photography—and prominently features five Black artists whose work is particularly significant. Scholars and curators examine how John Biggers, Michael Ray Charles, Christina Coleman, Angelbert Metoyer, and Deborah Roberts—artists with deep relationships to Texas—contributed to the Black Studies collections, to art history, and to the culture of our state and beyond.

  • Kerry James Marshall: Rythm Mastr. This Is How It Begins

    Kerry James Marshall

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    *Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30%*

    The iconic comic created by contemporary African American artist Kerry James Marshall.

    Marshall, widely considered one of America’s greatest living painters and inspired chronicler of the African American experience, has sought to diversify the art historical canon. In the late 1990s, he began working on a series of comics in response to the absence of authentic black characters and authors in the mainstream.

    Marshall’s comic offers an alternative reality focused on the main character, Rythm Mastr, and his young protégé, Farell, superheroes whose powers derive from the seven gods of the Yoruba pantheon. Marshall’s characters debate history, philosophy, and politics in vernacular black English using the graphic novel medium to create an empowering, utopian blend of science fiction and Afrofuturism.

    Initially serialized in a daily newspaper and presented as a Carnegie International installation, it has appeared in various incarnations over the past two decades, including light boxes, paintings, graphic prints, and drawings. This volume is the most comprehensive look at the character, its genesis, and its evolution.

  • Blue Opening: Poems

    Chet'la Sebree

    Sold out

    “A profound poetic talent.”―Ada Limón

    Blue Opening, Chet’la Sebree’s brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins―of illness, of language, of the universe―as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.

    With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is “unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith.”

  • A Song for Two Homes

    Michael Datcher

    $18.99

    From the New York Times Bestselling author of Raising Fences and the award-winning illustrator of Mama Africa!, comes a moving and lyrical picture book about a girl navigating her parents' divorce, featuring a Black family, two homes, and whole lot of love.

    Auset's parents tell her the divorce wasn't her fault, but she got split in two too. Now she has two homes, two rooms, two Christmases, and two birthday parties. It's tough to deal with her parents' divorce, but at least she has the songs of Sweet Honey and the Rock and Bob Marley to help her through. Plus, she has her therapist, and her stuffed animal Dolphie the Dolphin, who is an excellent listener.

    With two loving parents doing their best, here is a look at Black families, divorce, and how difficult it is for kids to go through. But with time and support, and everyone doing their best to keep it real, there's healing and strength on the other side.

  • Praisesong for the Widow: (Of the Diaspora - North America) (Of the Diaspora, 2)

    Paule Marshall

    $24.00

    Featuring a new original introduction by Opal Palmer Adisa

    Avey Johnson--a Black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls--has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel--and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed. Originally published in 1983, Praisesong for the Widow was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and is presented here in a beautiful new hardcover edition as the second title in McSweeney's Of the Diaspora series.

    "Astonishingly moving."
    -Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

    About Of the Diaspora
    McSweeney's Of the Diaspora is a series of previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic, the first novel in the series, was originally published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as an editor at Random House. This Of the Diaspora edition features a new introduction written by Brown for the series. Tragic Magic will be followed by Paule Marshall's novel of a Harlem widow claiming new life. Praisesong for the Widow was originally published in 1983 and was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in literature at the College of Southern Nevada. Published in collectible hardcover editions with original cover art by Sunra Thompson, the first three works hail from Black American voices defined by what Amiri Baraka described as strong feeling "getting into new blues, from the old ones." Of the Diaspora-North America will be followed by series from the diasporic communities of Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil.

  • How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

    La Marr Jurelle Bruce

    Sold out

    Winner of the 2022 Modern Language Association First Book Prize

    Winner of the 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association

    "Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; and in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, among many others. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes what he calls "mad methodology"—where madness informs and animates ways of reading, ways of thinking, ways of feeling, ways of telling, ways of being, and ways of life. Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.

  • Modern Negro Art

    James a Porter

    $21.00

    Porter's work analyzes the important developments and individuals in African American painting and sculpture from the pre-Civil War period to World War II. "James A. Porter was an art historian, educator, curator, and visual artist. He is first remembered by academics as an art historian who taught some of the best minds and visual artists who studied at Howard University during the span of his teaching career. "A pioneer in establishing the field of African American art history," writes Jeffreen M. Hayes, who rightly declares that:

    James A. Porter was instrumental as the first scholar to provide a systematic, critical analysis of African American artists and their works of art. An artist himself, he provided a unique and critical approach to the analysis of the work. Dedicated to educating and writing about African American artists, Porter set the foundation for artists and art historians to probe and unearth the necessary skills essential to their artistic and scholarly endeavors. The canon is borne from Porter's determination to document and view African American art in the context of American art."

  • Lauren Halsey: emajendat

    Lauren Halsey

    $60.00

    Inspired by the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood that the artist and her family have lived in for generations, Halsey’s expansive practice teems with the signs and symbols that populate that urban landscape and celebrates the community’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to advancing gentrification and the threat of erasure.

    The artist’s important work centers the on Black community, both aesthetically and materially. Halsey gathers icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience from local vernacular sources recontextualizing and reinterpreting them for her utopic fantasies of the city. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, her work—which includes wall works, massive multiroom installations, and immersive outdoor environments—is a potent reminder of the importance of community and home.

    Beyond the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means to reclaim lost legacies, drawing inspiration from Afrofuturism—a transcultural movement blending science fiction with aspects of Black art and culture—and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.

  • Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005

    James T. Campbell

    $30.00

    Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

    Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

  • Sungi Mlengeya

    Tandazani Dhlakama

    $35.00

    Whether infused by movement or stillness, Mlengeya's black-and-white portrait paintings radiate both power and peace

    Born in 1991 in Dar es Salaam, Sungi Mlengeya captures the essence of Black womanhood in her haunting monochromatic acrylic portraits. The meticulously painted figures are set against a minimalist white background, creating a striking contrast that emphasizes skin texture and form. Her portraits, whether infused by movement or stillness, radiate both power and peace, offering the viewer intimate moments of strength and serenity. In this first monograph dedicated to Mlengeya, the curator Tandazani Dhlakama brilliantly analyzes how African, Black and feminist conditions are intertwined in her work, and the intimate conversation between Sungi and her model, Jemima Michael, takes us behind the scenes of a work in the making.

  • Dear Mazie,: Sanctuary, Speculation, and Sky

    Amaza Meredith

    $45.00

    Redressing the woeful under-recognition of a pioneering Black queer architect and artist. This is an experimental illustrated reader exploring the work and legacy of American architect, educator and artist Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), a trailblazer who was the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States.
    This book takes Meredith's expansive letter-writing practice as a conceptual framework for epistolary responses in the present, plotting Meredith's life and work within themes of placemaking, gender, sexuality and Black love, with a focus on how she built sanctuaries (homes, institutions and communities) for herself and other people of color to foster rigorous artistic pursuit, free of persecution.
    The book features previously unpublished photos, blueprints, letters and scrapbooks from Meredith's archives and an annotated timeline of her life and work. Essays from architectural scholars and oral histories with former students, colleagues and friends explore her legacy in public education, the arts, modernist architecture and the built environment in the context of school desegregation, civil rights, and land and property rights. A diverse group of contemporary artists also respond to Meredith's legacy.

    This book was published in conjunction with Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

  • an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

    Sharon Patricia Holland

    $29.95

    In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.

  • Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present

    Angelyn Mitchell

    $39.95

    Within the Circle is the first anthology to present the entire spectrum of twentieth-century African American literary and cultural criticism. It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a quote from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains in her introduction the importance for those "within the circle" of African American literature to examine their own works and to engage this critical canon.
    The essays in this collection—many of which are not widely available today—either initiated or gave critical definition to specific periods or movements of African American literature. They address issues such as integration, separatism, political action, black nationalism, Afrocentricity, black feminism, as well as the role of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience. With selections from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others, this definitive collection provides a dynamic model of the cultural, ideological, historical, and aesthetic considerations in African American literature and literary criticism.
    A major contribution to the study of African American literature, this volume will serve as a foundation for future work by students and scholars. Its importance will be recognized by all those interested in modern literary theory as well as general readers concerned with the African American experience.

    Selections by (partial list): Houston A. Baker, Jr., James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Barbara Christian, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Sarah Webster Fabio, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Morrison, J. Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Wright

  • Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

    Dionne Brand

    $19.00

    One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024. Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

    Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

    In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries―tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

    With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light―in order to survive, and in order to live.

    This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

  • André: André Leon Talley―A Fabulously Fashionable Fairy Tale

    Carole Boston Weatherford

    $19.99

    This captivating biography chronicles the remarkable journey of fashion legend André Leon Talley–from humble beginnings in rural North Carolina to the pinnacle of the international world of fashion.

    Growing up in the Jim Crow South wasn't easy for young André. He escaped into the glimmering worlds he discovered inside magazines like Ebony and Vogue. He fell in love with all things French, and honed his taste for elegance and style in spite of those who judged and bullied him. Standing tall against all odds, André spun his hardships into a fashion fairytale of his own making.

    With exuberant prose and luminous illustrations, this picture book biography shares the inspiring story of majestic icon André Leon Talley and his enduring legacy.

  • The Known World

    Edward P. Jones

    $16.99

    Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

    Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

    An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

  • Roar of the Lambs

    Jamison Shea

    $20.99

    *Use discount code: SALE at check out for 30% off*

    If you knew the world was ending, who would you save? And would they let you?

    Sixteen-year-old Winnie Bray is a liar. As the resident psychic at an oddities shop, Winnie truly can see the future. But her customers only want reassurance, and Winnie only wants their money. Favorable fortunes are a fast track to funding her way out of Buffalo, New York for good, after all.

    But all of that changes when a vision sends her stalking in the remains of her family home that burned down in a fire 10 years ago. Among the ash and rubble, Winnie finds a box made of bone, untouched by flames and…whispering. At the touch of her finger, the box shows her a vision of death, chaos, and apocalypse, with her and rich kids Apollo and Cyrus Rathbun at the center.

    Apollo knows their cousin is up to no good, and with the Rathbun family scattered to the wind, they know Cyrus is aiming to present himself as the new patriarch. Despite an initial attraction, Apollo is reluctant to believe Winnie. But soon it becomes clear that their family histories are intertwined, with the whispering, hungry box at the very center, and more than their lives are on the line. Together, they must discover the origins of the box and stop unforeseen forces from fulfilling the apocalyptic prophecy, or die trying.

    From the author of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast is Me comes a speculative thriller about the ties that bind us to places and people, perfect for fans of Andrew Joseph White and Tochi Onyebuchi.

  • We're Alone: Essays

    Edwidge Danticat

    $18.00

    A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage

    Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.

    From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.

    Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so “we’re alone” is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation―we’re alone now, we can talk. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.

  • Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon: A Novel

    Mizuki Tsujimura

    $18.00

    A suspenseful magical realism novel about a mysterious teenage “Go-Between” who arranges meetings between the living and the dead, from multimillion copy Japanese bestselling author Mizuki Tsujimura.

    I bring together the living and the departed. I am the Go-Between.

    When a young woman from Tokyo contacts the Go-Between to request a meeting with a deceased TV star who once helped her, she doesn’t expect a teenage boy to show up. Dressed in a designer duffel coat and carrying a tattered notebook, Ayumi Shibuya, our mysterious intermediary, offers an extraordinary service: he reunites the living with their dearly departed. Meeting his clients at a luxury hotel, Ayumi lays down the ground rules: each reunion is a one-time arrangement that the dead can refuse; the service is entirely free, and the meeting must take place during a full moon.

    As Ayumi arranges these reunions, we encounter a resentful eldest son who wants to ask his mother to unearth the deeds to a plot of land; a teenage girl who blames herself for her best friend’s death; and a weary businessman seeking answers about his fiancée’s disappearance days after he proposed. With each rendezvous, clues begin to surface, leading readers to unravel the mystery of the boy in the duffel coat, whose own story is eventually revealed.

    A runaway, multimillion copy bestseller in Japan, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is storytelling at its finest, from an international sensation whose work has been hailed as “strange and beautiful” (The Guardian). With an artful balance of heart and mystery, Mizuki Tsujimura creates an unforgettable page-turner in which the living and the dead are given one last chance for closure.

  • Carla and the Tin Can Cake Party

    Carla Hall

    $19.99

    In this endearing picture book by superstar chef and beloved TV host Carla Hall, Carla’s grandmother helps her turn things around when a game of dress-up leads to a fancy tea party gone wrong.

    Carla and her sister Kim love visiting their grandparents’ home, where they can always count on having something fun to get into, like Granny’s old chest full of treasures! Dressed up in mounds of beautiful dresses, sparkling jewels, and fancy gloves, Carla decides the day wouldn’t be complete without a tea party for the girls’ special guests, Granny and Doc.

    But when Carla accidentally ruins her grandmother’s favorite quilt and famous pound cake, she fears that all the fun is spoiled. How can Carla and her family have a proper tea party without an elegant set up and delicious food? Then Carla’s grandmother steps in, sharing her recipe for a special cake. Will the secret ingredient help Carla save the day?

  • Under Color of Law (Trevor Finnegan)

    Aaron Philip Clark

    $15.95

    The murder of a police recruit pins a black LAPD detective in a deadly web where race, corruption, violence, and cover-ups intersect in this relevant, razor-sharp novel of suspense.

    Black rookie cop Trevor “Finn” Finnegan aspires to become a top-ranking officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and fix a broken department. A fast-track promotion to detective in the coveted Robbery-Homicide Division puts him closer to achieving his goal.

    Four years later, calls for police accountability rule the headlines. The city is teeming with protests for racial justice. When the body of a murdered black academy recruit is found in the Angeles National Forest, Finn is tasked to investigate.

    As pressure mounts to solve the crime and avoid a PR nightmare, Finn scours the underbelly of a volatile city where power, violence, and race intersect. But it’s Finn’s past experience as a beat cop that may hold the key to solving the recruit’s murder. The price? The end of Finn’s career…or his life.

  • Believe Me

    Dreda Say Mitchell

    $16.99

    In this gripping thriller from the bestselling authors of Spare Room and Say Her Name, one woman’s mysterious death has led to a lifetime of pain. Can her daughter find out why?

    “A compelling psychological mystery that will keep you guessing.” ―Woman’s Weekly

    Lawyer Gabby Lewis always knew she would die young. Since her mother’s death twenty-five years ago, she’s dreaded her upcoming fortieth birthday, the same age her mother died.

    When she discovers a connection between her mother and a suspicious mansion house, Ocean Haven, Gabby begins to suspect that her mother’s death wasn’t an accident, it was murder.

    Returning home Gabby sets out to uncover the truth despite her family, friends and the local police all telling her to stop. When she starts to develop the same mysterious symptoms that led to her mother’s death, she is certain she’s on the right track. But will she be able to catch the killer in time? Or will she become another victim of a murderer desperate to keep the past buried?

    Praise for Say Her Name

    “My book of the year so far.” ―Lee Child

  • Praisesong for the Widow

    by Paule Marshall

    $22.00
    From the acclaimed author of Daughters and Brown Girl, Brownstones comes a “work of exceptional wisdom, maturity, and generosity, one in which the palpable humanity of its characters transcends any considerations of race or sex”(Washington Post Book World).

    Avey Johnson—a black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls—has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel—and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed.
  • Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph
    $75.00
    Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life.

    One of the greatest artist-photographers working today, Smith moved to New York in the 1970s and began to make images charged with startling beauty and spiritual energy. This long-awaited monograph brings together four decades of Smith’s work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, dynamic street scenes, and deep devotion to theater, music, poetry, and dance—from the “Pittsburgh Cycle” plays of August Wilson to the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra. With never-before-seen images, and a range of illuminating essays and interviews, this tribute to Smith’s singular vision promises to be an enduring contribution to the history of American photography.

    Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts
  • Bang!: Masturbation for People of All Genders and Abilities (2nd Edition)

    by Vic Liu

    $17.95

    Expanded second edition of this instant classic with a foreword by adrienne maree brown

    Masturbation is one of life's great pleasures. It helps build self-knowledge, foster body awareness, and expand your sexual repertoire, no partner required. Anyone can use masturbation to explore their relationship to their body, desires, and pleasure. This joyful, unique book centers people of color, queer people, disabled people, sex workers, and other often underrepresented voices to bring an informative and beautiful perspective to self-love. Inside, you'll find sections on:

    • Masturbation myths shattered for good, with history and data analysis
    • Techniques-physical and emotional-for finding solo pleasure
    • A guide to buying sex toys and supporting feminist sex shops
    • Tips by and for transgender masturbators
    • Logistical advice and encouragement by and for wheelchair users
    • Guidance for teaching your kids healthy, safe attitudes about masturbation
    • Wisdom about giving pleasure to your aging body
    • Advice for working through internalized masturbation stigma and building a friendship with your genitalia
    Discover and share the joys of unpartnered sex with this beautifully designed, empathetic, practical, and fun guide.

    The second edition includes writing and illustrations by Vic Liu, Dirty Lola, Ev'Yan Whitney, Elle Stanger, Heather Corinna, Nina Chausow, Alex Tait, Clare Edgeman, Leah Holmes, Sam Dusing, Patrick Wiedeman, Rebecca Bedell, Lafayette Matthews, Andrew Gurza, and Angus Andrews, with a foreword by adrienne maree brown.
  • Loving the Dying

    by Len Verwey

    $17.95

    Loving the Dying is a collection of poems on life’s different stages. Set against the backdrop of a conflicted society, Len Verwey looks at a person’s life from youth and growing up to aging and dying, considering what the ineluctable reality of death might imply about how we should think about our lives.

    These are poems of uncertainty rather than certainty. The more overtly biographical ones end with as many questions as they start with, and there is often sympathy for the outsider or the marginalized voice. Varying in tone and complexity, Verwey’s poems focus on the tension between escapism and reality, truth and delusion (for individuals and societies), and the need to face death if we are to care for the aged and learn to understand the process of dying.

    As in his first poetry collection, In a Language That You Know, Verwey continues his effort to understand the successes and failures of the South African post-apartheid journey, with both humor and some despair.

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